Hi there! Did you miss us?
You’ve just experienced a common ailment called the blog lull, familiar to many as a symptom of life getting very busy for that blogger. In this case our lull was a result of the preparation for and multitude of questions subsequent to the annual Innovative Users Group conference. We had a great time getting to talk with librarians and hear what everyone’s been working on and wants to see us working on next. Now that we’ve begun to surface from the post-conference piles of email you can expect to see more happening here on the blog again.
Back before the IUG conference though, were two interesting ones I attended in March: South By Southwest Interactive and NISO Discovery. In a separate post, I’ll bring you the technology trends highlights from SXSW, but first I want to talk a bit about the Discovery ‘08 conference.
I was very impressed by how much was fit into this two-day forum. The title was “Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards” and the speakers covered a good overview from that central point about what’s happening with discovery tools and where they impact information standards.
Here are a few highlights to give you a taste of this fascinating meeting of the minds.
Richard Ackerman of NRC CISTI delighted me by bringing Ranganathan into the API world with his principles “Every web resource its machine reader” and “Save the time of the machine”. One thing about next generation interfaces is the whole user category of non-humans they may integrate or interact with.
The potential for exposing more metadata from datasets within documents was raised by Robert J. Sandusky of University of Illinois in Chicago in his discussion of deep indexing of tables and figures. This is a level of granularity below the usual focus of libraries, but certainly one of interest to patrons in many academic and business contexts.
There was a nice concise overview of the next generation catalog landscape from Peter Murray of OhioLINK. Interestingly he chose one of our non-Millennium systems for his Encore examples which was fun to see presented by someone other than me.
There were many more sessions and great conversation over lunch. I definitely recommend this conference to others with a keen interest in the intersection of metadata, standards, and technology.
And I’ll close with a great quote from John Dove of Credo Reference which reminded us of how accustomed we can become to our special vocabulary to the point where we’re out of sync with what will help our users take advantage of the tools we provide: “I no longer use the word database because my wife doesn’t use it.”
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May 29th, 2008 at 6:56 am
The choice to select a non-Innovative site to demo Encore was actually intentional. Given the limited time, I think a review of Encore is more powerful when it is showed against a catalog other than Millennium. It reinforces the concept that one can consider a discovery layer from someone other than the incumbent ILS provider.
Besides, where is the “wow!” factor in showing a new layer on top of an OPAC of the same vendor. :-)
May 29th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Hi Peter! Thanks again for the good presentation.
I rather thought that was part of your goal with choosing a non-Millennium site; it seemed to work very well to help bring in that point. You had a lot to pack into a short presentation and I was impressed by how much you were able to make an example serve quintuple duty!